"C" Not a fanfilm, but a low-budget film with a different approach

A 15-minute sci-fi short film called "C" is viewable online at Vimeo (link below) and while it is the topic of another thread, its approach seemed to be something worth bringing up here for fan filmmakers.

"C" is about a mutiny on a spaceship, and while the merits of the story are debatable, what's of particular interest here is that the film was made largely in the old-school way: sans CGI effects, no greenscreen. The effects are in-camera and the sets are lighting are practical. Even the spaceship shots feature miniatures which are shot with an ingenious substitute for a motion-control rig.

very nice looking. though why does the ship jettison its engines before zipping away? makes no sense to me.

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I think it was so that none of the crew could take the ship back to Earth. They were on a one way course to a new world. At the speed they were travelling, they may no longer have needed the engine to complete the journey.

very nice looking. though why does the ship jettison its engines before zipping away? makes no sense to me.

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I think it was so that none of the crew could take the ship back to Earth. They were on a one way course to a new world. At the speed they were travelling, they may no longer have needed the engine to complete the journey.

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Frankly, the story is pretty illogical. What interesting is that the preview film <link> and the Kickstarter promo film <link> seem to promise more than the finished product, which focuses on the action and not the reason's why. The film is called C but the whole subject of the speed of light is pretty much ignored.

I was more interested in the production values and techniques than the short, which I find 100% meh.

While this is immensely cool and very well done, it is worth noting that it's not exactly low budget.

Unless they had all that hardware sitting around ahead of time, the cost of creating the model shots is almost certainly > the cost of hiring an artist to produce what are really only a handful of exterior shots.

That said, I really like the look of this production. It absolutely wouldn't have had the same feel with CG, and I'm sure it cut down on post-production to have everything done in camera.

The bottom line, I still think CG would have been the less expensive option.. But I'm glad they did it the way they did it

When Derek Van Gorder and Otto Stockmeier decided to make a science fiction short about a mutiny on an interplanetary warship, they didn’t have the funds for CGI. They did, on the other hand, have access to the digital cameras that are part and parcel of any contemporary filmmaker’s toolkit. So they eschewed the digitally rendered graphics that are ubiquitous today, and instead set out to combine classic in-camera special effects with the advanced low-light filming capabilities of the latest cameras. The result: a unique science fiction vision for their film C 299,792 km/s, released yesterday.

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Which strongly implies that model work was intended to be a cost saving measure.

Perhaps that was just spin added by Wired? But I just don't see how a DSLR based motion control rig would cost less than producing a handful of simple space shots in their 3D program of choice.

Not only that:

quote said:

When Charles Adams came on board to actually build the ship, he used my father’s 3D model to re-build it once again in Rhino, adding a lot more amazing details, but more importantly this allowed him to produce accurate shapes for laser printing. Basically, with the Rhino 3D model Charles was able to generate a base kit of laser cut parts, much like a model kit you might get in a store. He then kit bashed all the amazing intricate details onto this base.

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They built the ship in 3D anyway to block out the physical model, so they had already invested in a 3d modeling program at that point and had a screen ready 3D model.

It sort of undermines the coolness factor by pretending that they used models just to save money (especially when it must have cost them more to do it this way) rather than acknowledge it was a deliberate stylistic choice.

I don't know why they made a point of saying they couldn't afford CGI since so much of the film is done old school.

Then again CGI can be cheap and easy when someone volunteers to do it for free, and no so cheap when you pay people to model, animate and render. If they already had a camera slide to do the motion-control thing, a model might not actually cost any more than CG,I and possibly less.